I just came from a lunch meeting with a really great friend; the kind of friend who comes into your life and makes a huge impact. As we were talking through what’s been going on in our lives, we finally got around to discussing how much weight we had lost and how we did it.
As I thought about our conversation I realized, it’s really hard to lose weight. It’s hard to change your behavior significantly to lose a significant amount of weight, particularly when you’re an adult, and almost every waking hour of your day is committed to something.
But here’s what hit me. Once you lose, you want to stay lost. Once you get the weigh toff, once you break the bad habit, once you move your life to a better place, it’s being there that helps you develop the habits that will sustain you being there.
Here is the “Aha” moment for me. The struggle is not in losing the weight, gaining the skill, changing your lifestyle or habit. It’s once you get there, realizing that the happy benefit of the hard work is the inner motivation to develop lifelong habits that will sustain the good thing you’ve worked so hard to achieve.
So remember this. The pain and struggle of losing weight lasts only for a little while. The benefit and motivation: a lifetime.